I've heard that Xbox hard drives don't need defraging, but mine is REALLY slowing down.

Xbox media Center is the most noticeable. It was one of the first things I installed on my modded Xbox, and it used to load almost instantly, but now, after putting several emulaters and ROMs on it, XMC takes about 20 seconds to load. What is this caused by, if not fragmentation, and how do I fix it?

 

The more you put on a drive,the slower it will get usually. It's just what happens.

 

well, well, well
look who it is, LOL ^^^^^

 

FATX is a bastardized version of FAT32, and does get fragmented. especially if you copy games with many small files onto the hard drive, delete them, and replace them with other games with very small files.
there is no defrag utility yet (probably never will be). The only way to fix it is to wipe it clean and restart from scratch.

 

XBMC gets slower the more you put on the drive because it has to scan and load everything at start up, just like if you load a few gazillion true type fonts into windows, it has to scan and load every one of them on boot up. XBMC has to scan and load all the games/apps/movies/music/etc... stored in the games/apps/movies/music/etc... folders.

kc

 

But once it has finally loaded up it would still be just as fast as normal if not for the fragmentation.
also some drives are significantly faster than others, I had a seagate 160GB that took almost 2 minutes to fully load up, but a maxtor 80GB does it in about 25 seconds whether mostly empty or completely loaded.
Granted, it would have to be severely fragmented in order to see any actual performance drain, but considering what I do to my poor xbox I could fairly imagine quite the slowdown if I had been running the box for a while